GNOME Do: A Fast Launcher For Your Linux Desktop

On the first look, GNOME Do is nothing more than a file indexer. It indexes your files and allows you to launch it from the search bar. After using it, you will find that it is actually more powerful than it seems. It is in fact a speed daemon that enables you to achieve many tasks easily and quickly.

The development of GNOME Do is inspired by Quicksilver and GNOME Launch Box. As such, you will find many features to be familiar. Once you installed it, you can easily summon the search box via “Super+Space” shortcut key. Simply type the name of the application or file that you want to locate and GNOME Do will find the match and display it on the left pane. On the right pane is the action that you can take with that file you have located.

For example, type in “Rhy” and the “RhythmBox Music Player” will show up on the left pane. On the right pane shows the “Run” action. Simply press Enter to load the RhythmBox Music Player. To make things even easier, you can give a command to play song from RhythmBox, just type “play [name of the song]” and press Enter.

Other than searching for files only in your system, GNOME Do also allows you to find online contents and execute more tasks via the use of plugins. The plugins database can be found here. Personally, I find that the Firefox, Twitter, Google Calendar and GNOME Terminal plugins have been particularly useful.

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3 comments

jbeaudin1says

It won’t work for me on my Toshiba Satellite laptop, running Ubuntu 8.04. I can bring up the interface and type in programs that I want to run, and it lists those programs, but when I hit the Enter button, nothing. I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled, and done some searching on the wiki, but can’t find any answers. Any ideas?

The “Enter” will work if you are running a script or opening an application. It does not work if you want to open a file. To open a file, you need to press “Tab” to get to the right pane (with the RUN option) follow by down arrow to choose the appropriate actions.